Magnificent Mahler–MTT and the San Francisco Symphony warm up at Davies for their Euro tour, series ends this weekend with Mahler’s No. 6
MTT--Michael Tilson Thomas-- and the San Francisco Symphony celebrate Mahler in performances of the 9th, 2nd and 6th Symphonies May 5-14, 2011. Photo: courtesy Michael Tilson Thomas
For all those lucky enough to nab tickets to Sunday’s sold-out performance of MTT leading SFS in Mahler’s No. 2, Resurrection, the performance did all the talking necessary. No one knows how or why sometimes magic happens…but Sunday it all came together—orchestra, chorus, soloists (Karina Gauvin soprano and Jill Grove mezzo-soprano —I closed my eyes and floated in glory…aware of the distinctive sound coming from each and every section of the orchestra and singers and the wonderment of their combined flair and flow. The SFS Chorus under Ragnar Bohlin’s direction though deserves special mention…its impressive entrance in the final (5th) movement was awesome–pure theatre–as its 140 members sang unaccompanied “Aufersteh’n” (“Rise again”) ushering in the resurrection theme and climax which soprano, mezzo soprano and full orchestra joined to bring the piece to end. Something so near perfect raises the bar, even for MTT. Now that he’s headed off with SFS and soprano Laura Claycomb and mezzo-soprano Katarina Karnéus for the big European tour (15 concerts in Prague, Vienna, Brussels, Luxemburg, Essen, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid and Lisbon), commemorating the 100th anniversary of Mahler’s death, it’s nice to know that we here at home got the smetana (that’s Czech for cream).
There’s still time to grab tickets for MTT conducting SFS in Mahler’s 6th Symphony in A minor this coming Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at Davies Symphony Hall. This is the third and final set of performances in the splendid Mahler series that has run at Davies since May 5, 2011. Composed in 1903-04, Mahler’s No. 6–a passionate, relentlessly tragic and terrifying masterwork–culminates with “three blows of fate” sounded by a hammer in the last (4th) movement. This is the very symphony that launched SFS’s recording cycle in 2001. And, now ten years later, SFS has just finished the final recording of its complete Mahler cycle on its own label, SFS Media, including all nine of the Mahler’s symphonies, the Adagio from Symphony No. 10, and Mahler’s works for voice, chorus and orchestra. The cycle has won seven Grammy® Awards, including three for Best Classical Album. But, as Sunday’s unforgettable concert proved, nothing beats the excitement of experiencing music live. Mahler’s No. 6 is replete with sudden juxtapositions of contrasting mood and tempo. It opens with a grim march and is later filled with the sound of cowbells, harps and a portrait of Alma, Mahler’s wife. I can’t wait.
And if find yourself in Vienna’s regal Konzerthaus on May 21-25, Tilson Thomas and the orchestra will perform Symphonies Nos. 2, 6, and 9 as part of the city’s Mahler commemoration, occurring just days from the 100th anniversary of Mahler’s death.
Michael Tilson Thomas, conducts San Francisco Symphony Mahler/Symphony No. 6 in A minor
Thursday, May 12 at 8 p.m.
Friday, May 13 at 8 p.m.
Saturday, May 14 at 8 p.m.
PRE-CONCERT TALK: Peter Grunberg will give an “Inside Music” talk from the stage one hour prior to each concert. Free to all concert ticket holders; doors open 15 minutes before.
AUDIO PROGRAM NOTES: A free audio podcast about Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 will be downloadable from sfsymphony.org and from the iTunes store.
BROADCAST: Portions of these concerts will be broadcast on Classical KDFC 89.9/90.3 FM on Tuesday, May 24 at 8:00 p.m.
TICKETS: $15-$140; available at www.sfsymphony.org, or by phone (415) 864-6000, and at the Davies Symphony Hall Box Office, on Grove Street between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street in San Francisco. Performance: Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco
review: Lang Lang at Davies Symphony Hall
Lang Lang played Beethoven, Albeniz and Prokofiev to a sold-out audience at Davies Symphony Hall on January 18, 2011 as part of their Great Performers Series. Photo courtesy SF Symphony.
World-renowned pianist Lang Lang was in San Francisco this week for two special performances: a Davies Symphony Hall Recital on Tuesday, January 18th, under the auspices of the San Francisco Symphony’s Great Performers Series and his 101 Pianists event Monday evening at San Francisco State University in which he joined 100 young Bay Area pianists in playing Schubert’s Marche Militaire. Both events were packed to capacity.
I caught his performance at Davies Symphony Hall on Tuesday evening, my first time to hear him live. The program featured Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas No. 3 and 23; Iberia Book 1 by Isaac Albéniz; and Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 7. This was basically a run-through of the most popular sonatas from his best-selling Live in Vienna album recorded in 2008–his second live recorded recital after his best-selling Live at Carnegie Hall in 2004. It’s also a program he has been touring with.
Lang Lang, now 28, has two decades of performances and celebrity under his belt. In 2008, over five billion people watched him play in the opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics, where he was seen as a symbol of the youth and the future of China. He is said to have subsequently inspired over 40 million Chinese children to learn to play classical piano – a phenomenon coined by The Today Show as “the Lang Lang effect.” But as much as audiences love Lang Lang for his zeal, critics waver, praising his technical virtuosity but panning his flamboyant gyrations, interpretation and lack of emotional connection to the music.
I came expecting something bold and spectacular. I’d read that at his last concert in San Francisco, for an encore, he played Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” on his iPad using the Magic Piano app and the audience went wild. Tuesday’s performance was energetic but nowhere near what my imagination had conjured in terms of showing-off.
Lang Lang conducted a workshop with 100 young Bay Area pianists practicing Schubert's Marche Militaire at San Franacisco State University's McKenna Theatre as part of his 101 Pianists event on Monday, November 17, 2011.
Lang Lang quietly walked onto the stage, sat down at the piano and started immediately with Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 3 in C major, a very challenging piece. It didn’t take long for me to become immersed in the beauty of his playing. Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No.3 in C major, written in 1796, in four movements, roughly 24 minutes, is often referred to as Beethoven’s first virtuosic piano sonata. It’s very demanding, especially the first movement and very emotive in the second, Adagio, movement. Lang Lang nailed the energetic second movement and then brought it to a tempered soft close.
Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, the Appassionata, composed in 1804-5, followed immediately. It is widely considered one of the masterworks of the composer’s middle period, very dense, evocative and meant to be played with the unrelenting ferocity that Lang Lang is often criticized for. This was one of the first pieces written after Beethoven became fully aware of his progressive and irreversible deafness and was written during the period that he was labeled with the madman/genius image. The Appassionata was also the first piece he wrote after having received a state of the art piano as a gift from the Érard piano company. Beethoven’s statement– this is very beautiful music that is also testing the crap out of this piano, as it is my own hearing. How did Lang Lang do? Respectfully well. The piece was about twenty three minutes long. Almost immediately, I felt myself floating away on a cloud orbiting the concert hall channeling the very deep despair that Beethoven himself must have felt. When I landed, I noticed Lang Lang’s the left hand stationary in space as the right played…the right hand then slowly and weirdly directing, coaxing the left. There were moments too when he seemed to be acting with sensitivity to accentuate that he was playing with sensitivity. It looked like a guy trying way too hard to manufacture feelings he didn’t have and importantly, we felt that. And this is the core of the debate about Lang Lang. It’s completely subjective, but the antics took away from my experience of a piece played exquisitely.
The highlight came after the intermission with Albéniz’s Iberia, Book One in three movements, a century (1905-1909) and miles apart stylistically from Beethoven. From the first muted bars of Evocación to El Corpus in Sevilla, Lang Lang excelled at this beautiful and richly textured piece thought by many to have been truly mastered only by the great Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha. Book One’s three movements are typical of the entire piece—poetic middle episodes, incisive rhythms, bold harmonies, and infused with local color. Evocación is dreamlike with a very powerful climax in the middle section which Lang Lang mastered. El Corpus in Sevilla, one of Iberia’s most popular segments, employs a march tune from the Spanish town of Burgos. The great procession is at first distant and then ushered in by the piano imitating drumbeats that grow louder and louder and the excitement builds. The movement grows quieter in its mid-section, gets festive again, and then ends with a long serene coda all mystery and poetry. Lang Lang’s body movements and hand gestures punctuated the silences as well as the counter-rhythms.
He closed with Prokofiev’s revolutionary and explosive war sonata, Sonata No. 7 in B flat major, Op. 83 a piece he was clearly at ease with but passionately banged the heck out of, ending in a flurry of speed.
He encored with Rachmaninoff’s D-Major Prelude, Op. 23, No. 4, then followed with a gorgeous Chopin Etude.
In all, I came away in awe of Lang, who like Elvis, does it his way. Lang Lang was off the very next day (Wednesday) to play for President Obama and first lady, Michelle Obama, at a lavish State Dinner honoring Chinese President Hu Jintao. Lang Lang will play four-hands with Jazz legend Herbie Hancock and “My Motherland,” the theme song of a famous 1956 film called Battle on Shangganling Mountain set during the Korean war.
Details: next up in the Great Performers Series is Russian opera baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky in solo recital of songs by Fauré, Taneyev, Liszt, and Tchaikovsky on Sunday, February 13, 2011, 8 p.m., Davies Symphony Hall. Tickets: $15 to $83. Box Office: (415) 864-6000 or http://www.sfsymphony.org.
Lang Lang’s next Bay Area performance is this Sunday, January 23, 2011, 7:30 p.m., at the “Master Piano Series: an Evening with Lang Lang,” at California Theatre, 345 South First Street, San Jose. Tickets: Sold Out. Check for last minute availability.
review: Blind Boys of Alabama at Davies Symphony Hall, December 19, 2010, Bluesy Gospel for the Season
The Blind Boys of Alabama performed "Go Tell It on the Mountain" at Davies Symphony Hall on December 19, 2010. Photo: Courtesy Blind Boys of Alabama.
Last night’s performance by the the Blind Boys of Alabama at Davies Symphony Hall was magic— head-clearing, heart-opening, let loose and dance magic that got hearts pounding and spirits flowing. The Blind Boys got together way back in 1939 at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind and while some of their original members have passed, they have found their way through nearly seven decades by belting out impeccable harmonies that beautifully blend old time gospel spirituals with blues, rock, reggae, and country. You may have seen them on Letterman or PBS. They have received 5 Grammy Awards, been celebrated by The Grammys and The National Endowment for the Arts with Lifetime Achievement Awards and inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame. The group currently includes vocalists Jimmy Carter, Bishop Billy Bowers, and Ben Moore, and drummer Eric (Ricky) McKinnie, lead guitarist Joey Williams, and Tracy Pierce on bass. The main focus was on the core trio of vocalists, especially lead singer and founding member Jimmy Carter, a spry octogenarian, who opened by telling the audience that the Blind Boys don’t like to perform for conservative audiences. The reverie of claps and whoops in response assured him that San Francisco was cool enough to take whatever they had to offer.
Though designated a Christmas concert, the Blind Boys didn’t promote that theme too hard. Of the evening’s five holiday songs, only three were well-known standards. Ben Moore’s soft and tender delivery of “Silent Night’’ gave souls pause while “Go Tell It on the Mountain’’ was a jazzy, organ-dominated blues that got people clapping—gospel (off beat) and normal style. It was “Amazing Grace” set to the acoustic guitar chord sequence of “House of the Rising Sun” that transfixed the crowd. So unexpected was this combo, that at first it was impossible to tell there was a familiar spiritual in the lyrics. At the end of the song, founding member Jimmy Carter held a note full force for what seemed like a minute and then he did it again later– cocky and joyous. For the most part, the trio mainly remained seated front and center until it was time to step up and grab the microphone and sing and then each shimmied and rocked in his own way. Jimmy Carter told us all he was hungry and that about sums it up…these men are in their golden years but still hungry for life. During a lively rendition of “Look Where He Brought Me From,” Carter walked the aisles of the symphony hall with a string of dancing audience members in toe. While the Blind Boys might have sensed it, the crowd itself was a spectacular and wildly colorful seasonal site to behold—bold red jackets, lots of velvet, fur, and big glittery jewelry melded with traditional upper crust diamonds and tuxes. And in the upper tier, two luscious ladies tightly packed into low-cut bright red halter dresses stood on their chairs and swayed with hands raised high to heaven, evangelical style. Special guest acclaimed soul/blues singer Ruthie Foster opened the concert.
“Go Tell It on the Mountain” will next be performed in Los Angeles on December 20 (tonight) at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Details: Davies Symphony Hall annual “Holiday with the Symphony Series” runs December 2-31, 2010. The series has two remaining performances: “Twas the Night” (Wed, Dec 22, 2010 – Fri, Dec 24, 2010) and New Year’s Eve Masquerade Ball with the San Francisco Symphony (Fri, Dec 31, 2010) (For details on New Year’s Eve pre-concert dinner packages, call patron services (415) 864-6000.) (For details on special hotel packages, call (800) 441-1414. ) Tickets: www.sfsymphony.org
